~ Researching Russell Co, Kentucky

Category Archives: Genealogy Methods

This week’s Snack was to complete 1 specific PERSI search on the Findmypast website. I thought about making additional searches as future Snacks, but decided to keep them all together so that a researcher can have all information possible before making a copy request or traveling to a library to find articles.

In Snack #5, we entered our County and State in the search box, but the PERSI team doesn’t know your County the way that you do. This time, enter the name of a town in the “Optional Keywords” box and you are likely to see articles you didn’t see in the County search. If the town name is a common one, add your State to the filter as well. This search works best for smaller towns. When I entered “Louisville” into the “Optional Keywords” box, I got over 10,000 hits. When I tried “Creelsboro” (a small town in Russell County), I got 9 results, 2 of which had not been tagged with the County name.

If you get a decent number of results, go ahead and copy and paste them all into your tracking sheets. If you complete a sort to make the article titles alphabetical, it will be easy to spot duplicates.

Note – if you try to enter a town name in the “Town/City” box and you don’t get a pop-up suggestion, then you haven’t really added that filter. That’s why I suggest using the “Optional Keywords” box instead.

From the search page – enter your County in the “Publisher” box. Take a look at the choices that appear in the pop-up menu. Select the Genealogical/Historical Society you are interested in and click “Search Periodical Source Index” at the bottom of the filter box.

You will get a list of all of the articles published by that group. But you might be surprised to find several different publications. Be sure to click on the numbered buttons at the bottom. If you’d like an example, try putting “Wayne County Historical Society” in the “Publisher” box. You will not only see “Wayne County Historical Society” but you will also see “Overview”, “Wayne County Historian”, “Wayne County Historical Society and the Old Jail Museum”. You might want to start a list.

If there are multiple publications, you can go back to the main search page and enter the name of one publication in the “Periodical” box. When you complete the search, you will get a list of every article published in that Periodical. In our original search, you were seeing every article from that publisher.

Do you see items you’d like to explore further for a specific ancestor? Add that article to that ancestor’s Research Plan!

Start a new search. Click on the “Browse Periodicals” link and enter your State in the search box.

See anything you never would have thought to look for?

Put a check mark in front of one of the periodicals and click “Apply Filter”. This will take you back to the search page with your periodical added as a filter. Click “Search Periodical Source Index” at the bottom of the search area and you will get a list of every article in that periodical.

Try to add multiple filters to narrow down your list. The one box that I personally find a little irritating is the “Subject” box. Let’s say I only want to see articles about the Military from my County. If I type “Military” in the subject line, I get multiple suggestions in the pop-up such as “Biography,Cemeteries,History,Military Records,Surname”. There does not appear to be an option for “Military” alone. When I select one from the list, I get zero hits even though I can see at least 1 record from my original list that has the category of “Military Records,Surname”. Play around with the different options and see if you can find some hidden articles that you never would have thought to look for on their own.

I have been finding so much great information for the family I am currently researching that I have not taken the time to finish the video I put together for using the bottom half of the Family Group Sheet. But I made that a priority today and now it’s ready!

Every family that we research has a different puzzle to be solved. Who were the parents? Have I found all of the siblings? Was the person who witnessed that deed related in some way?

Because every family is different, doesn’t it make sense that customizing each Family Group Sheet would be helpful? Sometimes, I’d like to have information for more than just a couple and their children. I wasn’t able to make the changes that I wanted to with the current format of the Family Group Sheet that I had originally created. To help with this, I’ve created an updated version of the half-sheet FGS and it is now available in the “Downloads” tab at the top of the screen. I’m deleting the old version as this new version looks exactly the same, but has more flexibility than the original version did.

I have 3 specific families that I have been working on recently that I am using the “Amped-Up” FGS to help me with. The video will show you what I did to keep track of all of the pieces for these puzzles.

For the first family, both the husband and his wife were born in Europe and met after arriving in the US. I wanted to add cells to their Family Group Sheet to keep track of any information I had found related to their immigration. When I attempted to add those cells to the group sheet, the formatting was not behaving the way that I wanted. With the updated FGS, I am able to add as many cells as I’d like to the form.

The second family puzzle was a little more detailed. I have been trying to find all of the children of James Conn Sr, who was born in 1751. He did not leave a will, but I know that the land was passed on to his children based on various deeds that I have found after James’ death. Some children indicated that they were selling their 1/11th share of the land. Some grandchildren indicated that land they were selling had been passed on to them from their parents and James Conn’s original patent was mentioned in the deed. I’m attempting to find all of James’ children to see if anything in their records would tell me the name of James’ wife. In order to prove who the children were, I wanted to search for any deed records for James’ children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren. I did not want to create group sheets for every great-grandchild, but I wanted a way to keep the lists of names managable. I have found a way to do that using my updated FGS.

For the third family, I am attempting to solve the mystery of a previously unknown sister from Kansas. I wanted a way to keep the information for 3 generations of the family all on one FGS so that I would know where to be looking for records and in what time period.

Remember, the updated half-sheet FGS is available in the “Downloads” tab at the top of the blog. That is the base for the techniques that I’ll be sharing in today’s video tutorial. Maybe this video will help you think of some ways to customize your own group sheet. If it does, I’d love to hear from you!

How often have you looked at information you’ve written somewhere and wondered, “Where in the world did I find THAT?” It happens to me a LOT. Usually, it’s when I look at information I had collected as a new genealogist (because I’m FAR wiser now than I was then! LOL!)

When you have a great deal of information that you are collecting such as we have been doing while building a surname database, you have to decide if you’re going to take the time right now to create your final source citation or if you’re going to collect the information that you will create your final citation from. In this video, we will be creating hyperlinks which we can click on to go directly to the document the information is coming from. Did you know that FamilySearch provides a citation for each document they have scanned? But there’s more than one citation included depending on where you look so we will also be collecting all of the source information using the comments feature in Excel because there is no option for adding a footnote.

I’ll also show you one of my absolute favorite tools in Excel – the filter. When I have an overwhelming list in Excel, I use the filters option to look at small, specific chunks at a time.

Once again, I find myself with some unexpected time to work on some genealogy and I decided that I would work on creating something I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while.

Last year, I retired from teaching and I brought home a lot of teaching materials that I thought might be helpful in presenting or organizing my genealogy work. One of those things was a big stack of sentence strips. Elementary teachers use the 3” x 24” sentence strips to make games and flash cards and to help students practice handwriting, sentence structure and such. I used mine to make labels around my classroom because they are very colorful. You can get these strips in packages of 75-100 for $5 – $10 depending on if you buy them online or at a teacher supply store. Even stores like Walmart carry them. (In fact, as I look at the website now, I see they have wipe-off strips. Hmmm…..)

I’ve looked at these strips for a long time and thought that they would be perfect for making timelines. The strips are different on the front and back and my vision was that the timeline would be on the multi-lined side and the side with 1 line only could be used for notes. So I played around with them last night and I like where this is going so far.

I decided to make the timelines in 10 year chunks – to go along with census records. I decided that the focus of my timelines would be locations. Could I discover an un-researched area that I should be spending more time looking at based on basic census information? Especially after comparing locations for various people at a certain time? Could I determine a migration pattern for various lines in my research?

I made marks 2 ½ inches apart and left a little extra room at one end to write the name of the person I was tracking. After writing some examples on some scrap pieces, I decided that the strip would be oriented vertically. I have a column for the year, location, type of record and short notes. If I want to include a longer note, for example – more details on a land grant location, then I write a small arrow to show that there is more information on the back.

I like the idea that I can line up these strips to look for patterns and information that I might not have noticed otherwise. I don’t think this will be the first time that I’ve mentioned that I’m a very visual learner, so this helps me a lot.

When I am not using the strips, I can clip them together with a binder clip and hang them on the bulletin board near my desk.

One simple example I can show is how I can determine the potential birth location for a person. When I place the strip for one of John M. Smith’s son-in-laws (Thomas Simpson) next to HIS father’s strip, I can see that it is likely that Thomas was born in Wayne County, Kentucky. Because I don’t have proof of that yet, I put the location in parenthesis. I certainly could have figured this out without the strips, but it is an easy example to show.

I decided that my goal for today’s project would be to try to determine the most likely location that John M. Smith was living for the 1820 census since I believe there is literally a John Smith in EVERY 1820 census.

First, I made my strip for John. I have a lot of information for John, but it only spans a 9 year time frame. Because I have found John listed near 2 future in-law families in the 1826 and 1827 tax records, I decided to make strips for 3 generations for each of those families plus the other 2 sets of future in-laws who I haven’t done as much research on. I kept the color for each family the same. Luckily, the package of strips contains 5 different colors, so I can have John plus the 4 in-law families.

When I line up the strips for the key people in the 5 families, I can overlap them so that I am only seeing the year and the location. I find it quite interesting that all 4 of the in-law families were living in Wayne County in 1820. Would it be out of the question to think that perhaps John M. lived in Wayne County at that time as well?

I believe there are 4 different John Smiths in Wayne County around this time. I’ve collected deeds and tax records for every John Smith in Wayne County between 1815 and 1825 (when a portion of Wayne County became the area of Russell County that John lived in) but I have not had the time to transcribe and really analyze them. Before this, I didn’t know if I wanted to put that much time into a wild guess, but it seems like more of an educated guess now and I’m anxious to see what kind of information might be hiding in the records that I scanned, but haven’t read. I think I’ll also go back and collect deeds for each of the “in-law families”.

My next goal will be to see if I can match land records to tax records to see if I can rule out any of the John Smiths in the area because based on tax records, my John did not own any land at this time. I can see that for that task, it will soon be time to fire up the Excel program!!

My John M. Smith (@1775 – 1835) appeared in the records I have found at a most inconvenient time. Russell County was formed in 1826. John bought his first tract of land which was half in Russell County and half in Wayne County in April of 1827. John’s sons were not old enough to appear in tax records at this time and he left no will when he died in 1835. I am certain of 6 children based on land records when they each buy or sell the land that was their part of John’s estate. But how can you move backward in time when the first land owned by a man comes that close to the formation of a new county? Especially with a name like John Smith! I know of no brothers or parents to follow and his children were too young to be listed in any records at this time.

Recently, I found tax records for Wayne County from which John’s part of Russell County was formed. I am pretty confident that my John was in Wayne County in 1826 and 1827 because the tax records for those years are organized by military company and John was listed in between 2 families who would eventually become in-laws. Henry Hardin Payne married John’s daughter, Sarah, in Russell County in 1828. Henry’s father was Philemon Payne. Thomas Simpson married John’s other daughter, Mary Jane, in Russell County in 1838. Thomas’ father was Reuben Simpson Jr and Abington was Thomas’ brother.

1826 Wayne Co Taxes

1827 Wayne Co Taxes

Unfortunately, most of the county tax records are arranged “alphabetically” – based on the first letter of the last name. Luckily, Smith and Simpson both start with S! John M. owned no land at this time, but his future in-laws did – and it was on Beaver Creek where John would eventually settle.

Still guessing, but at least it’s a little more of an educated guess. Inching my way backward, I have found:

John Smiths listed in 1825, but none of them are close to a Simpson.

In 1824, the page is dark with lots of ink bleed through but I can see a John between Abington Simpson and an Edward Smith. It does not look to me like the John is a Smith, but it is so garbled, I can’t be sure.

I can not find a likely candidate in 1823.

In 1822, John is listed on the page 3 lines above a possible Reuben (hard to read the handwriting) with Abington on the next page.

A John Smith (with no land, of course) is nestled nicely around Abington and Reuben Simpson in 1821 and 1820.

No John Smith that looks like a match before 1820.

So could there be a potential 1820 census for John Smith in Wayne County? Yes, but only if I’m able to keep an open mind…

John should be about 45-50 years old in 1820. He should have around 4-5 boys and 2 girls at this time. I know that there are probably additional children who died before John died. At least 2 sons died before 1840 – but they received land when John died, so I know a little bit about them – but not the years they were born. I do not know when John’s wife died, but I have never seen a deed or a census record in which she was alive.

I can once again use the future in-laws as a finding aid. These images are the bottom of one page and the top of the next.

Looking for my “normal suspects”, starting on the first page above, I see Abington and Reubin Simpson Sr and on the next page, I see 2 John Smiths followed by Reubin Simpson Jr. The top John Smith does not have enough children and the bottom John has too many girls. (The 3 is the beginning of the females.) I don’t see a woman who is old enough to be John’s wife, so I’m wondering if perhaps his wife has passed away and some family members are living with him to help raise the children? Or if some of the youngest girls passed away before the next census.

So these are certainly possibilities, but what will my next step be? I’ve looked for all court records with a John Smith in Wayne County and I find none. Records for the others I’ve been following are only records for roadwork. I can’t think of any other records that can help me know for SURE that I have the correct John.

I think I’ll try looking for land records for the Paynes and the Simpsons. Perhaps John was a witness for a deed. Other future in-laws in the county at this time are Peter Ellis and Andrew Meadows, so I’ll look for their land records as well. I’m also going to try to research a couple of Smith names that I’ve seen near John in the tax records – Christian, James and Edward/Edmund. Perhaps these men are brothers that can give me some clues. These are not names that I recognize from my research in other potential counties, but they did own land in Wayne County, so I will try to find deeds for these men to see what I can discover. I could also try to go through the tax records again to create a list of names who live on Beaver Creek. Perhaps those are deeds to look for as well.

I do feel like this path is much more likely than any other path I’ve tried for John, so for now, I’ll rejoice in the records that I’ve found and try to think “outside of the box” for my next step. Any ideas you’d like to share would be appreciated!

In my last post, I was craving a giant bulletin board to try to sort all of the wills and deeds and marriage records, etc. for the different John Smiths that I’ve found. So I thought I’d go back to a web site that I used to use several years ago for class projects. The site is Prezi.com, but boy has it changed a lot since I’ve used it last!

I can’t say that I feel that it is a super easy site to learn, but there are some video tutorials that would be helpful – if I would take the time to watch them! I thought I knew enough to get a basic start, so I just jumped right in.

The cool thing about the site is that you can zoom in or out as much as you want, so my goal is to create an area for at least 3 different John Smiths with each man’s will at the center of their area. You can include images or text and you can create paths so that a presentation will flow from one area to another as you direct. But I want to be able to quickly move from one area to another, so I’m just creating my giant bulletin board.

I’m putting the will in the center of each area. Then I’m placing text for each person mentioned in the will around the circle. As I find information for each person, I’m adding that along with a line to connect the person to the document or information. If you double click on an area, the program will zoom to that area for a closer look. So I can zoom out to see the whole project:

Or I can double click to zoom in on a specific person:

If you’ve told the site to keep the full sized image when uploading, you can click on an image until it is full screen to be able to read the text. I’m trying to include marriage documents, wills, land records or other information paying close attention to witnesses and neighbors to try to make connections for each family. For example, if a John Smith gave permission for his daughter to marry and the witness to the consent was a neighbor of a specific John Smith, then that could help me narrow down which land deeds go with which man.

It’s pretty slow going because I did not take the time to watch the tutorials – and I’m sure there are some awesome features that I’m not using. It is certainly a work in progress! It is easy to move objects and text at any time, I just wish I could move a group of objects at the same time. (Which is probably possible, I just haven’t learned it yet.)

The free account comes with 100 MB of space – enough for a “few prezi’s” according to the website. I thought it was interesting enough to share my idea, but I’m no where near being knowledgeable enough to give any “how to” information. I just thought you might like to see what I’m doing to see if you might like to give it a try.

Yesterday, due to a bad sinus headache, I desperately turned to Siri on my phone to transcribe a deed that was out of focus on the microfilm. This worked so well, I did some research to help limit the amount of corrections I was making after copying the email I sent into my word processor. I thought I’d share a few more common things here but you can see a complete list of commands from the Apple site by clicking here. As I collected this list, I had deeds and wills in mind, so you may find additional commands helpful for other things on the Apple site.

Now if I could just learn to pronounce “appurtenances” so that Siri would understand me….

Oh the weather outside is frightful…..well, maybe not that bad…but cloudy and snowing none the less. Not a storm, but a steady flurry of snow with dreary clouds everywhere. And my sinus headache reminds me what the weather is, even when I can’t see the skies!

This morning, I went to the library with a list of deeds to scan and wouldn’t you know it, several pages on the reel were not scanned in focus – including a short series of pages containing a deed I was especially anxious to see. I scanned the page anyway and printed it out before leaving. It almost looks like it was filmed twice in the same frame. So I knew I’d want to transcribe the page immediately or I’d look at it later and be less than motivated to try to decipher it.

Enter the sinus headache – there was no way my eyes could go back and forth between the document and the computer screen. Not even if I had the scan and word processor side by side. My head would have split wide open leaving quite a mess on my desk! If only I could read it out loud and have someone else type it for me….wait a minute…..what about Siri on my cell phone?

I decided to give it a try and I think I have a new “normal” way to transcribe my documents! I opened a new email, clicked on the microphone and began to read. She was amazing at recording what I was saying! Of course, a few words were “auto-corrected”, but those were easy to find and correct in my word processor. I was able to read several sentences before Siri would “bing” at me, indicating that her memory was packed, so I’d click “done”, she’d type what I had so far and then I’d click the microphone and continue reading. By the time I was done, I had a nice little email ready to send.

I copied the email into my word processor and began to read for accuracy. Since I’d just read it out loud, most things I was able to fix without even looking at the horrible copy I had from the microfilm. Some of the “misinterpretations” included:

Overall, not too bad! I’m certainly going to use this method for the other deeds that I scanned today and if they go as smoothly as this one did – I may be grabbing my book of deeds to see how many I can get transcribed this week-end!

And now I’m thinking about using this same method during my 10 minute drive home from the library. Seems like my brain churns out questions about what I’ve just discovered and using Siri to type an email to myself as I think of these questions would be an easy way to make my list while everything is still fresh in my mind.

Hmmm….other thoughts are now going through my mind….this could get interesting!